Firechild

by Jack Williamson

  “If you want a drink—”

  Its eyeless head turned alertly to follow while he filled and offered the water-stained glass. It stretched for the frothy beer, sucking thirstily.

  “Hungry?”

  He dug again through the box the chopper had dropped and found a can of tomato soup. No opener had been included, but he split the top of the can with his pocket knife and poured cold soup into the glass. Tentatively, he offered a drop of it on the tip of his finger. The pink thing leaned daintily to taste and squealed for more. It had sucked up almost half the can before it drew lazily away to pipe a tiny note of what he took for contentment.

  He opened a can of corned beef to make himself a sandwich that he ate with another tepid beer. Escaping the hot room, he went out into the building’s slightly cooler shade and sat on the step with the little creature on his knees. It snuggled toward his body and lay still, coiled like a small pink snake.

  Its mouth had vanished. Its purring throb slowed and ceased, as if it had gone to sleep. Its scent rose around him in the humid heat, faint but clean and pleasant. Vaguely like fresh-cut hay, he thought, but really like nothing he knew.

  He thought it had to be a product of genetic science, probably Vic’s own creation, yet it remained a tantalizing riddle. If it really belonged to another kind of life, engineered from a new protoplasm never known on Earth—what could it unfold, for biology, for medicine, perhaps for future history?

  He shivered again, a little in awe at all its unknown potentials, but more afraid for its own future. For Dusek would be reporting it. Men from Watchdog would soon be here to take it for examination. It wouldn’t want to be examined, and suddenly he felt certain he didn’t want to give it up.

  He watched the road the jeep had taken. Nothing came back along it. All he could hear was the unending beat of the searching choppers, half a dozen of them low in the east, forever crossing and recrossing the ash and dust of Enfield.

  Toward sunset, another arrived from toward the perimeter. It circled the motel and settled over the parking lot, so low its hot engine fumes took his breath. A crewman leaned out with binoculars focused on him and the pink thing. Aroused, the little creature raised its head and shuddered against him until the chopper lifted.

  “Better watch “em.” He stroked its quivering coils. “They could hurt you.”

  He heard the TV thump. The air conditioner came on, and the room was cooling when he came inside. The KBIO newsroom had vanished from the tube. He twisted the dial, searching for news. A blast of rock music. A feminine hygiene commercial. Finally a special documentary, the title just fading. BIOGENETIC BLACKOUT.

  A network anchorman came on with a roundup of what he called official information sources, though he had gotten very little actual information. Washington was denying a rumor that Enfield had been devastated by the accidental malfunction of a secret military biological. Though the Secretary of Defense remained unavailable, State had issued a white paper formally denouncing all biological warfare.

  “With no accusations stated or implied, and regardless of anything known or suspected about the intentions and capacities of other nations, the American government has solemnly and repeatedly assured the world that it never had and never would undertake any preparations whatever for genetic aggression.”

  The White House had condemned all such weapons. The President described them as “demoniac inventions, devised to turn the most secret and sacred forces of life against themselves.” Although interrupted communications were yet to be fully restored, civil defense officials still insisted that the “Enfield incident” had been, in fact, merely a needless panic due to baseless rumors and unfounded media speculation.

  The documentary continued with shots of sleepy people in airline terminals waiting for canceled flights to be resumed; shots of National Guardsmen called up without notice to serve on the quarantine perimeter; shots of indignant congressmen demanding information.

  In reply to questions about yellow rain in Asian wars and a rumored anthrax epidemic in the USSR due to experimental mischance, unnamed spokesmen had denied knowing of genetically engineered weapons under development anywhere. The American government had no connection whatever with EnGene.

  The corporation was privately held. Attorneys defended the innocence of the unidentified owners, claiming that EnGene had been totally devoted to the creation of new lifesaving pharmaceuticals. Nothing under development there had any possible military use.

  That was all.

  The night sky was alive with throbbing choppers when he looked outside. Searching now, he supposed, with infrared detectors. Discovering nothing. They never would.

  Waiting for Watchdog to come for the pink thing, he opened the last warm beer. It made that tiny mouth again to share it with him. Relaxed with that, it coiled in his lap and seemed to sleep. He laid it on the bed and lay back beside it, uneasy for it but uncertain how to help.

  Its small whistle woke him.

  Gray daylight filtered through the dingy curtains, and another chopper was roaring low outside. The pink thing shrilled again. Blinking groggily, he found it at the door, its eyeless head turned hopefully back to him.

  “If you think you can get away—”

  He stumbled to open the door.

  16

  La Pendeja

  Pancho Torres spent most of that hot night on the windmill tower, lying flat on the high platform under the broken wheel, watching Enfield burn. There was no moon till midnight, but towers of flame and red-lit smoke revealed the fire. Steadily it spread, a bright streak running far along the horizon, the nearer trees and buildings standing black against it.

  Strange fire, because it ceased to smoke. No smoke was left to dim the late moon’s yellow curve when it rose beyond the town, yet still the fire burned on. Like a white sea rising, it reached and drowned those closer shapes. Slowly crawling, it seemed to burn everything. Trees and houses, fields of corn and grass. The highway cut a black slash across the glowing white. Before dawn, it had crept almost to the bridge where that wrecked car had burned.

  He saw motion. Animals running. The cattle he had seen, grazing so peacefully then. Bellowing, at first far away, they came racing out of that slow bright tide, down toward the stream he had crossed. At first they were black silhouettes against the brightness, but in a moment it had washed them. The bellowing died away. One by one, they staggered and went down into the grass. Shining, their bodies flattened and dissolved. New fire spread from where they had fallen.

  Shivering, even in the warm and windless dawn, he knew he had to run, even if he didn’t care. But not quite yet. The strangeness of it held him. The eastern dawn had already grown brighter than the fire, but still he saw no smoke. He felt no heat. No common fire had ever burned so strangely.

  Even if it had come to burn the whole world for too many centuries of sin, he wanted to avoid it as long as he could. Stiff from lying too still too long on the splintery boards, he stood up to go. Looking again, however, while he flexed his achy joints, he thought its deadly march had stopped. Had sunlight somehow quenched it?

  He lay back on the platform to keep on watching.

  It had come almost to the stream. Its edge was a sharp-drawn line. Closer to him, grass and weeds still grew green. A red pony grazed, unalarmed. Beyond the line, gray ashes spread as far as he could see. Only a few scattered objects had somehow escaped, a row of steel towers that carried power wires, the grain elevator, the downtown buildings where that man on TV had taken refuge.

  He lay a long time there. Unharmed flies came to buzz around him. The ashes shimmered under the driving sun, smokeless and dead. No wind stirred them. He watched the red pony. Grazing to their edge, it trotted on into a wide gray tongue of ashes, lay down to roll in them, stood and shook off its own small gray cloud and ambled on down to the creek. Waiting for it to shine and die, he saw no sign of harm. The pony drank and grazed back along that line of death.

  His feeling of danger fading, he
fell half asleep. A drumming engine roused him. Another military chopper, cruising low, men with binoculars scanning the ashes. A hazard he could understand. Motionless till it had passed, he wanted a place to hide.

  The old wooden water tank standing by the tower— it was big enough to hold him, high enough on its own platform to let him watch in all directions. He peered inside, where broken staves had opened a window, and decided it would do.

  Back in the abandoned house, he found blankets in a closet, gathered up the rest of the bread and ham and beer. Searching the empty garage, he found a flashlight and a camper’s ax. He erased the marks of his presence as best he could, washing and replacing the few dishes he had used. He locked the door again, climbed to the tank with his loot, and used the ax to break out a larger door.

  The old tank was a wooden oven, even hotter than the jail cell he had escaped. Yet he stayed there, climbing now and then on a stack of broken staves to look out through the manhole, sleeping when he couldn’t stay awake. The whole sky soon throbbed with choppers, flying low outside the dust, a little higher where it lay. Twice one of them came to hover near the house, the crewmen shouting through a bullhorn. They didn’t touch the perilous land.

  Darkness fell. Waiting till no engines were near, he went back to the house. The power was off, the refrigerator stopped, the TV dead. Wondering how Marty Marks had fared, he ate and drank by flashlight, washed dishes till the water quit running, and returned to the tank.

  That night he watched and napped and watched again. The black sky roared with engines. The land lay black below them, no fire burning anywhere. Now and then he slept, dreaming that he was coming home to San Rosario, where he thought there would be no electric chair and his mother would call him un hombre and this strange fire could never burn. He woke to weary bitterness. His mother was dead, and he would never be seven again.

  The next day was even hotter. Sweating in the tank, he was afraid to leave it. Choppers filled the blazing sky, flying slower and lower than ever. He saw the glint of searching lenses. Late in the airless afternoon, he watched a military jeep that came cautiously toward the town. It stopped on the hill while men climbed out to set up a tripod, perhaps to take photos. They stopped again before they reached the ashes, went fast when they left.

  He climbed out of his stifling prison to watch them out of sight. Tired of hiding, he was halfway sorry that he hadn’t been discovered. Fear of the law and the chair, fear of that strange fire, fear of all he didn’t understand—he had feared too much, endured too long. In the end, unless that cold and deadly fire overtook him first, they surely would find him.

  When they did, he would tell the best tale he could invent. If jailors enough were dead, and legal records burned, perhaps they would believe him. Perhaps—but he couldn’t really care. His luck was lost. Live gringos were no better than their poison ashes, and nothing would ever matter again.

  No le hace nada.

  He clambered back down the ladder. In spite of all the gringo choppers, he had to stretch his legs. He started walking down toward the stream. His cramped muscles rejoiced to action, and something changed his bitter mood. Whatever evil things were coming, the air had grown a little cooler. Low in the darkening west, a delicate feather of cloud turned to glowing gold. He caught the sweetness of a honeysuckle climbing the white picket fence.

  He came down to the stream and stopped on a grassy bank. The water ran clear, pebbles shining through it. He scrambled down the bank, stooped to wash his grimy hands. It felt cool and good. He dropped on his belly to wash the sticky sweat off his face. Something pink and quick flashed toward him through the ripples. It jumped out to kiss his chin.

  Una culebra!

  A water snake, striking at his face. His mother had taught him to dread las culebras de cascabel, the rattlesnakes that made their winter dens in the rocky slopes above San Rosario. He sprang back from the water and stood trembling with that old fear until he heard a thin little cry from the edge of the water. An odd, anxious sound, almost like the peep of a hungry baby chick.

  Snakes didn’t speak. He bent to look and saw the pink thing coming out of the water. No snake and no pollita, it crawled on four tiny limbs, like una salamandra. It stopped at his feet, looking up at him with bright black eyes.

  He had whistled in astonishment. Now he saw its minute mouth pucker daintily. Its tiny whistle echoed his own. No longer afraid, he suddenly wanted to help it. He put his hand down to the sand beside it. With a grateful little whine, it squirmed into his palm.

  “Qué es?”

  It lifted a pink doll-face and squeaked eagerly again, as if trying to tell him what it was. Certainly no salamandra. Its skin was too rosy, the tiny features so much like a human baby’s that he flinched from a fleeting recollection of the gringo women he had known, those carefully elegant putas who took his money and scolded him for mussing their hair and laughed if he ever spoke of his old dreams of marriage and ninos.

  “Quién sabe?” he murmured to it. “La pobre pendeja! Poor little pink thing! Who knows what you are? Tiene hambre?” The gentle Spanish seemed to fit it better than the rough gringo words. “If you’re hungry, let’s look for supper.”

  17

  “Nothing on

  Earth”

  Belcraft stood that morning at the door of number nine, watching the pink thing drop off the steps and creep along the side of the building. It paused at the corner. The featureless head rose and twisted as if to look back at the roaring chopper and then at him. In another moment it was gone, toward the rank jungle of weeds and underbrush between the motel and the creek.

  He stepped outside and waved to the crew, hoping to hold their eyes until the little fugitive was safely out of sight. Nobody answered his gesture, but the machine slid lower and he saw a man in dull-spotted camouflage aiming a big camera at him, perhaps to take back proof that he still survived his excursion into the dust.

  He waited in the hot engine reek until the chopper lifted. Back in the room, he stripped off the clothing he had worn all night, showered in tepid water, dressed again. Eating an orange out of that gift carton, he tried the TV.

  Channel Five was still dead. A worried anchorman on another network was rehashing stale reports of the Enfield incident. Official Washington, he told his viewers, was repeating assurances that all evident hazards to the public health had been safely contained. The network news staff would be standing by to cover anything—

  A rap on the door. He opened it to find Lieutenant Dusek backing uneasily away. The muddy National Guard jeep was parked on the lot behind him.

  “Dr. Belcraft?” Dusek’s haggard eyes swept him. “You still okay?”

  “So far as I can tell.”

  “Dr. Kalenka.” He nodded at another man waiting in the jeep. “A civilian scientist with the task force. He wants the creature you brought out of the ruins.”

  “He’ll have to find it.”

  “What?” An angry yelp. “What happened to it?”

  “It came to me.” He shrugged. “It went away.”

  “You let that monster go? Do you realize—” Dusek checked that heated question. He stood silent for a moment, looking sick, his stubbled face twitching. “Doctor, can’t you imagine how it felt to die in Enfield?”

  “I’ve tried.”

  “Then why in God’s name—” His voice quivered, and he stopped to control it. “Doctor, I grew up there. My father had split. Mom brought me up—teaching fifth grade and playing the organ for the Methodist Church. She was going to retire next year. Saving for a world cruise she never got to make.”

  His lips quivered. “Doctor, that town was my life. I played Little League and rode a paper route and went to high school and dated a girl I was hoping to marry, if—if—” Fists suddenly clenched, he was sobbing. “Dead! They’re all dead. Carol and Mom and all the kids I grew up with.” His voice turned savage with accusation. “And you—you let that monster go!”

  “My brother died in Enfield,” Belcra
ft said, his own voice uneven. “But please don’t blame that little creature. It wouldn’t hurt anybody.”

  “You were told—” Dusek caught himself and stalked away to speak to the man in the jeep. “Come out here.”

  He turned to beckon. “Dr. Kalenka wants to talk to you. Out here in the open.”

  He went out to the jeep. Kalenka was a compact man in mud-spattered khaki. He wore a flat brown cap and a short black mustache. Anxious brown eyes scowled out of a firm brown face.

  “Near enough!” He raised a nervous hand. “Your name’s Belcraft?”

  He nodded.

  “Related to Victor Belcraft?”

  “My brother.”

  “What do you know about his work at EnGene?”

  “Nothing, really. We haven’t been together since medical school. We never really had a falling out. Just lost touch because we lived and worked so far apart. I think he was totally absorbed in his research. Which he never told me anything about.”

  “Huh?” A skeptical grunt. “So what are you doing here?”

  “The night before—before whatever happened—Vic called me back in Iowa.”

  “So?” Kalenka looked at Dusek and squinted back at him. “What did he say?”

  “Just enough to puzzle me. Nothing at all about his work. He spoke about our boyhood in Ohio. He seemed emotional, more I think than he had ever been. His tone left me troubled, though he seemed more elated than depressed. Next day I drove down here. Afraid of something wrong. I guess something was.”

  “Plenty wrong.” A grim little nod. “You’ve been into the contamined area? In defiance of military orders?”

  “I drove out into the ashes.”

  “I understand you brought an animal back?”

  “A little creature I found crawling from what’s left of the EnGene lab.”

  “What have you done with it?”

  “Nothing. It stayed with me last night. This morning it wanted to go. I opened the door and it crawled away.”